Category: Applications

Tom Coates of Plastic Bag (and now Yahoo!) has long been reliable for his occasional thoughtful long-form essays about the nature of the web as a medium. Back in February he posted one called Native to a web of data. Then a few weeks ago Christina Wodtke posted about it to the IAI list, summing…

Michal Migurski is annoyed with javascript delays and other “Ajax abuse” slowing down sites and points to a Safari plug-in that enables him to selectively turn of javascript at specific sites.

A month or so ago Dan sent me a link to Gliffy.com, an Ajax-y OpenLazslo-driven browser-based collaborative diagramming tool that could conceivably give Visio a run for its money (someday). Even with its limited initial feature set it makes fairly crisp looking diagrams with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Knowledging Across Life’s Curriculum has a brief…

On their blog, the Zimbra folks explain a technique they called ALE (for Ajax Linking and Embedding). I saw Zimbra demo’d at South by Southwest. It looks like a pretty cool next-generation groupware application, a potential Outlook killer, with easy drag and drop from numerous external applications into a calendar, address book, phone dialer, and…

New York Times dot com designer Khoi Vinh discusses the 37 Signals manifesto, Get Real (Subtraction: C’mon Feel the Signalz) and the ensuing discussion in his blog’s comments illuminate the controversy Fried and company’s increasingly strident calls-to-arms have stirred up. Vinh tends to admire where the 37s gang is coming from: [I]t’s hard to deny…

Having met Rashmi Sinha at SXSW and again at the IA Summit I’ve been interested in understanding what she’s working on. She’s brilliant so her work product must be equally compelling. Sure enough, her company Uzanto makes a product called MindCanvas that’s used to conduct user research in a game-like way (check out the testimonials…

I have to admit I’m almost relieved to learn that everything Jason Fried et al. touch does not automatically turn to gold. People love, love, love 37 Signals’ hosted Basecamp project management service (we’ve considered adopting it here at Extractable), but IA guru Christina Wodtke recentply posted her Top Six Pet Peeves with Basecamp.

I use Mindjet’s MindManager program for brainstorming and notetaking, and for building sitemaps. Up to now it’s been a Windows-only application. Now, it appears that Mindjet is about to start beta testing a version for the Mac.

At O’Reilly’s ETech conference, groupware guru Ray Ozzie (of Lotus and Groove and now Microsoft) demonstrated a proof of concept of a “smart” cut-and-paste feature for the web (using RSS as the transport mechanism). According to Scott Rosenberg, he demonstrated the clipboard using Firefox. He also posted links to live screencasts and a web-based demo.

It looks like the user interface people on the Firefox team have some interesting ideas about prospective changes to the browser chrome. (The newsgroup post linked here is more or less illegible in a proportional font. I copied it to a text file and viewed it with a monospace font and then all was hunky-dory.…

First of all, Web 2.0 is definitely hype. It’s a marketing concept whose meaning varies depending on who you are talking to. For some it means web-as-application-platform, for others it means social web (or living web), and for others still it means a new round of VC investment and rags-to-riches tales. So let’s get that…

This is it. The Firefox Extension I’ve been looking for. As a site developer I spend a great deal of time switching between IE and Firefox to test browser support. This extension completely removes that need and brings it all home. I haven’t tested it extensively however one of my other gripes has been the…

This stuff’s all over my head, but it seems to be talking about tricks to get the performance of Ajax applications in the browser without trading off the standard browser experience your users (and Jakob Nielson) have come to expect (Developing Ajax Applications That Preserve Standard Browser Functionality): To provide the traditional Web usability features,…

Anil Varma of Refinery makes some intuitive points regarding success factors for implementation of a Content Management System in this white paper (Four success factors for a Content Management System). As I frequently work with Extractable’s clients during the early stages of Content Management System evaluation, I strongly believe that understanding the business and user…

Graham is right that Web 2.0 started off as a brand invented for an O’Reilly Conference. He says now it means something along the lines of “using the web as an application,” “Ajax,” or “doing things the way they should be done” on the web. Here’s his take on Ajax: One ingredient of its meaning…

Shimone just sent these around via mail: SF Bay Area Tech Companies Companies advertising on their rooftops for the benefit of Satellite Imagery